Customer Complaints Experience

We design customer complaints experiences that makes things simple, authentic and fair for your customers.

The experience your customers get when they complain is as important as fixing the issue, and a poor experience increases escalations, reduces satisfaction and doesn’t give customers a sense you care. We can help you transform the customer complaint experience – reducing escalations, improving satisfaction and giving customers a fair outcome.

Start with what matters

Starting with what matters to customers

What do your customers really want when they complaint? Is it compensation? Or perhaps a sincere and upfront apology? Defining these early on helps focus the complaint journey on the things that impact customer satisfaction the most. Customer sentiment and feedback is a good start to uncovering these themes but you may also want to engage with complainants in deeper analysis.

Customer Complaint journey

Pro-actively designing your customer complaints experience

We can help you map out and deliver a smoother, more human complaint experience for your customers. Finding the moments of truth that can turn a complaining customer into an advocate.

Complaints are already emotionally charged which means customers are hyper-sensitive to issues in process, unnecessary effort or feeling of being ignored. Mapping our your complaint journey can help you spot these issues before they happen.

Steps in your complaint journey

Making each step clear and easy for customers

As with any customer journey it’s important to understand the steps a customer goes through when complaining. With complaints it’s also important to look at the “passive state” steps too. These are the points in the journey where the customer is waiting to hear back or isn’t actively involved in a dialogue with you.

Customers often have a different perspective on time when complaining and what may feel like an acceptable window to you may feel too long for customers. Spot the passive states and see what you can do to update or inform – even when there’s nothing new to say.

Setting expectations early

Being upfront and avoiding nasty surprises

You may know your complaint process like the back off your hand but it’s unlikely your customers do. Setting customers’ expectations early (what they can expect, by when and by who) is an important factor in making them feel empowered and informed.

It’s also useful in setting out anything you may need from them and when they’re likely to hear back. Review each part of your complaint journey to see where you can improve expectation management and keep customers informed.

Managing the emotional impact

The emotional context of your customer complaints experience

Your complaint journey should be geared around accepting, managing and (when appropriate) deescalating irritated or angry customers.

How customers are acknowledged, listened to, whether they feel you’re “on their side” and even the level of sincerity you show will all impact customer attitude.

Touchpoints

Clear, human communication throughout a complaint

The communication and interactions your customers have through a complaint are one of the single most important factors in overall satisfaction. That means reviewing every email notification, update and conversation customers are likely to have with you. Depending on how whether this is predominantly templated or freeform will impact how much you can control upfront.